In order to get shares and likes, some people put their titles as ridiculous things like "Islam is a Violent Religion." I believe this practice is called "clickbaiting." It's like when Pornhub ads tell you there are single women right there, just waiting for you. It's like that weird banana ad that says you, too, can lose 10 pounds in one week. Those are relatively harmless, other than the misled people who only eat bananas to lose weight.
This behavior, this notion that Islam is violent, is not harmless. There are consequences that are never felt by the ones who put up that headline, but the ones it applies to. I am not Muslim, nor an expert on Islam, but have grown up in a culture that doesn't always agree with Islam. Just Google the Gujarat riots. We've had a tense back and forth with the minority for years, but there's one thing that'll always be in my head.
My teacher, standing at the front of the classroom, trying to impress one very important thing to us: Jihad is not violent. Can it be? Yes. Is it written in stone? No. Some people say Islam was always a violent religion, that since its inception, the Qur'an has been soaked in blood. And yet, we're not saying that about Christianity, where they sent children to fight their holy wars. No, we're going to say Islam is proselytizing and so harmful! We've got to stop combing through history to find these acts of violence because every religion, every state has had some horrific violent act committed by their people. Some people are crazy, and some people misunderstand things.
Jihad can also be interpreted as the struggle against internal sin. Let's read that again together, shall we? The struggle against internal sins. Catholicism is entrenched in people recognizing their own sinfulness and overcoming this. I'm not trying to say that we don't need to recognize that there is a hotbed of violence. Every religion has radicals, and we're focused on those of Islam in this time period. Let's just not advocate a religion or ethnicity based immigration law, or that we can somehow root this out of America. Let's acknowledge that Omar Mateen should never have been able to get a weapon. But let's also realize that had a ban on Muslim people getting weapons been enacted say, a couple years ago, Dylann Roof would've still shot up that church. Harper-Mercer would've still killed nine people, as would Holmes in the theater, Page in the Sikh temple and countless, countless others.
It's time to take responsibility and move on, hopefully, to stricter gun laws and a country where the death tolls keep going down, not up, and we don't label white shooters as "mentally ill" and non-white shooters as "terrorists." Anyone who commits a mass shooting is mentally ill, regardless of ethnicity.
One of my best friends had a quote I couldn't resist inserting here.
"I've seen too many posts claiming that the Orlando Attacks are the "Nail in the Coffin" for Islam, or that Islam has a violence issue. I still believe that hate and mistrust are not the appropriate response to a tragedy, such as what happened in Orlando. Blaming the easy target of Islam perpetuates a culture of xenophobia. Xenophobia, which created the violent hate for Western culture and intrusion. On days like today, I ask you to remember that everyone is a person, with fear and mistrust, but also with compassion. If we can rise above the base impulses that drive us apart, then we can start to repair. Please do not blame those who have never met the perpetrators of such attacks, and are just as quick as you or I to condemn their actions. Together, we can be stronger than the hateful actions of a few." (Thanks, Joe).
There were 42 other shootings the day Mateen opened fire. That's a problem.
